At the family level, we often see one sibling hate his other siblings and

litigate with them endlessly if he can afford it. Indeed, a wag named Buffett

has repeatedly explained to me that “a major difference between rich and poor

people is that the rich people can spend their lives suing their relatives.” My

father’s law practice in Omaha was full of such intrafamily hatreds. And when I

got to the Harvard Law School and its professors taught me “property law” with

no mention of sibling rivalry in the family business, I appraised the School as

a pretty unrealistic place that wore “blinders” like the milk-wagon horses of

yore. My current guess is that sibling rivalry has not yet made it into property

law as taught at Harvard.

 

Disliking/Hating Tendency also acts as a conditioning device that makes the

disliker/hater tend to (1) ignore virtues in the object of dislike, (2) dislike

people, products, and actions merely associated with the object of his dislike,

and (3) distort other facts to facilitate hatred.

 

Distortion of that kind is often so extreme that miscognition is shockingly

large. When the World Trade Center was destroyed, many Pakistanis immediately

concluded that the Hindus did it, while many Muslims concluded that the Jews did

it. Such factual distortions often make mediation between opponents locked in

hatred either difficult or impossible. Mediations between Israelis and

Palestinians are difficult because facts in one side’s history overlap very

little with facts from the other side’s.